the static frame

(It’s at this point that you might think that there must be some sort of strange “disconnect” between how I see the world and how things actually are. I don’t have much empathy if I kid around about it being a “me thing”….that Mondays are only hard for “me”. I know that the end of the weekend is hard for everyone. I’m just fooling around before I drink my coffee.)

The thing that makes it hard is the repetition of it all.

It feels like all I do is work.

Work, work, work.

It’s like I have to work to eat or something.

It’s like I have to work to put food in these babies’ mouths.

I guess I just need to “stay in the club”. I’ve already joined it.

That’s nature, you know?

It’s the repetition that kills…and saves.

If it wasn’t a habit, I couldn’t get up in the morning.

I was thinking about repetition, though, and I realized something this morning.

It’s like my life has a frame…a frame that seems to be cast in steel…framed by cement or something hard and immobile.

IT IS WHAT IT IS…AND NOTHING SWAYS IT. THE CLOCK IS MY MASTER AND WHEN IT SAYS “JUMP”, I START FEELING FROGGY.

But inside this frame is where the life happens. It’s the inside.

Sometimes it feels like it’s a television screen…and a hyperactive monkey with ADD is the one with his fingers on the remote.

It’s a cornucopia of ever-changing hues…framed by the static repetition of my working life.

But if I take a closer look, the repetition is different everyday, too.

I might see a hawk up on the power line on the route. It might be raining. It might be snowing. I might see a bear…or a bunch of deer…or get to wonder where that black dog who looks like she’s nursing 20 puppies somewhere out in the woods really lives.

When I wake up at the same time every morning, and look at the clock, and realize that I have to go to work again, it feels the same.

It’s time for more of the same.

That’s what it feels like when all I can see is the unmovable frame.

The frame feels so heavy that sometimes I can’t see the picture inside.

This Monday thing….it’s a universal thing, I know that. We all freak out a little on Monday. It’s the beginning of our week of “quiet desperation”. It’s not the weekend anymore.

It’s not “our time” anymore.

But the whole life isn’t just the “frame”.

It’s everything that happens around the frame…both inside and outside the frame. Maybe it’s not something that hems us in…that squares things and stops us from moving and growing…maybe it’s just an edge to rest the life we’re living on?

It’s just a square line around the picture that makes us look “inside the box” to see what a life can really look like. This frame is not a prison cell.